The utilization of mobile devices in the working environment has become indispensable. Therefore companies often offer their employees the possibility to use mobile devices issued by the company, or to bring their own devices that can be used and integrated into the company's working environment. In either case, those devices, or the applications running on the devices, need to be fully or partially managed by the companies in order to comply with company policies. In some work environments, such as those handling highly sensitive company data, there is a particular need to control the usage of the mobile device's native features such as camera, microphone, Bluetooth® connection, etc.
A simple approach is to simply deactivate those features on mobile devices used in a company's working environment. However, such approach has been considered to be unacceptably restrictive. Another approach is a geofencing-based deactivation, in which one or more features of the mobile device are automatically deactivated within a defined geographical area, i.e. based on a geoposition of the mobile device. However, such approach is still overly restrictive in most cases because the deactivation is not context sensitive but only geo-position related. Further, such approach requires controlling other device features such as GPS, WLAN, or Bluetooth, etc. There are no other factors involved. Thus, device features will either be activated or deactivated there is no solution in between.
Yet another approach is to monitor and log service invocation by mobile applications. Business application services invoked by a mobile application can be logged so that auditing on a business application invocation level can be executed. But this solution does not log any utilization of device features and especially not with respect to a user's working environment.
Accordingly, there is a need for a flexible solution for managing mobile devices in an enterprise environment that enables the relaxation of restrictions related to device features, but at same time allows compliance to company policies.